Why must we resort to name-calling?
Hi. Hello. Welcome back. I called you yesterday. Are you avoiding me? Don’t answer that.
Can we talk about the name Clafoutis? Stuffy. Pushy. French. Bossy. And I loathe being bossed. Don’t boss me! I’m telling!
Except I would never tell on you. ‘Cause I love you. This love, it’s a crazy, mixed-up sort of love. I think about you quite often. And I *sigh* We know each other, and still, we love. Well, at least we think we know each other, since we’re kind of in that honeymoon phase where we think each others’ quirks are darling. Look at the way you chew your food, 100 times on each side of your mouth! Isn’t that adorable? This honeymoon is the best one I’ve ever had.
When was the last time you went into a bookstore? An actual, brick-&-mortar bookstore? For me, it was yesterday. Remember when I texted you and asked you to come with, but you said that you had to wash your hair, so you couldn’t make it? That excuse seemed a little thin. Love you anyway!
For what it’s worth, I meant it when I promised not to drag you to the bookstore just to see if they had my book in stock {again}. Or to put it in front of Gwyneth Paltrow’s book in the showcase bookshelf {again}. Or to count how many books Rachael Ray has out {first time for that one}. But it’s okay. I had a good time all by myself, and I barely even spent any time at all in the cookbook section {read: 45 minutes}. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh right. I was looking for a book on how to crack the WordPress code to save the world from web designer domination by editing my own website. Still looking. Book suggestions welcome.
So there I was, alone and knee deep in web design books, and I realized something: There is no place to sit in bookstores any more. When and how did Barnes & Noble go from a veritable Ethan Allen showroom, full of overstuffed, Starbucks-inspired arm chairs, to a 7-Eleven? Did this all happen while I was hiding copies of those Paleo Diet books in the children’s section {which, by the way, still has a full complement of services to offer the toddler set while the rest of us sit on the cold, hard floor trying to find just the right book for what ails us} that time? Don’t answer that. I’m too humiliated.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
The point is this: I don’t wish to call this sweet cherry treat a clafoutis, even though it more resembles that than anything else. Clafoutis sounds fussy and overbearing. And if it’s not crystal clear by now, I have no business being fussy and overbearing. And, anyway, my version has an egg in the mix, and that is not traditional {but very useful in holding the whole thing together, as it is gluten-free, after all}. It’s similar to a cobbler, but the top of a cobbler is more of a biscuit than anything else. And this is more cakey than biscuit-y. Plus, it’s even easier than cobbler. It’s sort of a grease-scatter-mix-pour-bake-serve-warm deal.
I know it can get old, this having to make everything from scratch, just to have something gluten-free and delectable. So I think we all could use a no-brainer recipe for some of our Summer fruits every now and again.
Here’s how we got here: Last week, in my CSA farm share, I found the most lovely fresh sour cherries. And, before long, they were wilting. Wilting! They had to be pitted and baked! Stat! I do not care for cherry pie when you have fresh {the freshest!}, beautiful cherries like I had. Cherry pie filling is all gooey and so … ooey. A waste of fresh, round cherries! Oh, the humanity! Time was of the essence. The only reasonable thing to do was to place my cherries in suspended animation. Bake them like this, and they will thank you by largely holding their shape, frozen in the batter as the dish bakes.
Sprinkle with powdered sugar, and enjoy warm. Or at room temperature. Or cold. I’m not the baking police. Clearly, I’m not the boss of you. And if I were the boss of you, I’d totally promote you before anyone else because of the crush I have on you.
| Cherry Sorta Cobbler {but who knows} |
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose gluten-free flour (I use Better Batter)
- 3/4 teaspoon xanthan gum (omit if using Better Batter)
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 extra-large egg, lightly beaten
- 12 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), melted and cooled
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups milk, at room temperature (low-fat is fine, nonfat is not)
- 4 cups pitted cherries, preferably sour cherries
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose gluten-free flour
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease well with unsalted butter the bottom and sides of a 9 by 13 inch baking dish. Set it aside.
- In a large bowl, place the 1 1/2 cups flour, xanthan gum, 3/4 cup sugar, salt, baking powder and ground cinnamon, and whisk to combine well. Add the egg, butter, vanilla, and milk, mixing well after each addition. Continue mixing until the batter becomes thicker and a bit more elastic. Set the bowl aside.
- In a separate medium-sized bowl, combine the pitted cherries, 3/4 cup sugar, and 1 1/2 tablespoons flour, and mix to combine.
- Scatter the cherry mixture in the greased baking dish, taking care to distribute the cherries evenly. Pour the batter evenly over the top of the cherries, and shake gently to help distribute the batter evenly.
- Place the baking dish in the center of the preheated oven, and bake until the batter is set, and beginning to brown on top, about 40 to 45 minutes, rotating once during baking.
- Remove from the oven, and allow to cool about 10 minutes before sprinkling with powdered sugar and serving warm.
Bean flour blends are not true all-purpose gluten-free flours. They will not behave the same as an all-purpose gluten-free flour.
Neither Pamela’s Baking Mix nor Pamela’s Bread Mix is an all-purpose gluten-free flour. Both are mixes for specific purposes, not for “all purposes,” as they contain many more things than just flours.
Yes, my love. You can definitely bake this in two separate dishes (I used a tart pan and a 9-inch square baking dish, and both turned out lovely). Just bake them one at a time in the center of the preheated oven, and for about 25 to 30 minutes each.
Love you. Mean it.
xoxo Nicole
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Thanks. Just froze blueberries and peaches this weekend, surely most any fruit would do. Looking forward to this for quick company dessert, too. :)
Hi, Thursa,
Blueberries will work great, peaches have a much higher water content, so you have to allow for that. Berries work best.
xoxo Nicole
Waaaahhhhhh! I didn’t get any cherries in my CSA share. Evah. 4th year with ‘em and still no cherries! Maybe because I live in Maine and no one I know grows cherries. Boo hoo. I want a Clafoutis – just because I enjoy saying it. Clafoutis. Clafoutis. It sounds a little naughty. So if one doesn’t have any cherries on hand and there don’t appear to be any organic ones in my local market – what would be the next best seasonal fruit to substitute? Blueberries? Strawberries?
And yes Barnes and Noble has become standing room only and I don’t like it either. I’m the one who always seems to be wearing a skirt when she decides to go book shopping. So there I am, on my knees, skirt placed strategically to cover any bad views, balancing my Chai Latte in one hand, head cocked hard to the right to read the titles, and down on my knees. How am I supposed to find the love of my life looking like that? Where’s the graceful movie scene in that? More like, damnit I spilled my chai that cost me $5! Ugh, how long has that patch of cellulite been visible to the public? Ay yi yi, I got a kink in my neck from having to strain it so far to the right to read the titles. Maybe online ordering really is for the best, the prices are way better at B&N online than in-store. I’m getting the feeling they really don’t want me there anymore. No chairs, higher prices, and nothing GF in their cafe!
I need a huge serving of Clafoutis STAT!
Hi, Jayne,
I love that image of you in the bookstore. In a skirt. Craning your neck. That’s me, minus the skirt, but probably wearing cutoff shorts that are made only for standing up, and not for sitting down. On the floor, especially.
Take heart about your CSA. When I got cherries, that’s all I had in my fruit box that week! They were lovely, but they were lonely. :)
xoxo Nicole
Jayne,
I’ve always made Clafoutis with strawberries…and Nicole is right, any berry will do. I think raspberry clafouti would be just dreamy! Thanks for this recipe Nicole!
-(the other) Nicole
Hi, Other Nicole,
Oooh I certainly wouldn’t kick a raspberry clafoutis out of bed. :)
xoxo This Nicole
yum!! I love your Coffee Cake recipe, too. I made it yesterday and it is still delicious this morning. Thank you!! Thank you!! p.s. will be buying your book for my Kindle!
Hi, Trude,
I’m so glad you’re enjoying the coffee cake! You’re welcome. :)
xoxo Nicole
Not only have I been in a real brick-and-mortar bookstore, I work in one! Jealous? It is a children’s independent store, and is just fabulous! We don’t have your cookbook in stock, but it is in the inventory, because that is where I ordered it. Do a kid’s cookbook and it will be there. Not to give you more jobs to put on your list or anything! I wil probably give this one a go with other fruits, too, like the raspberries in my backyard, or the blueberries that I ordered and should be coming my way soon — what do you think? Really hot and humid here, you would hate it! Even I had to put in the airconditioning!
Hi, Anneke,
You KNOW I’m jealous! I live in fear that brick & mortar bookstores are going to go the way of the dodo. They already closed down the one that was right in my town, so now I have to travel a bit to get to one. It’s the only one for miles, and I swear I buy books there rather than online to do my part to ensure its survival! I don’t think I could do a cooking-with-kids cookbook. I don’t really like cooking with kids. I know, I’m horrible. But at least I’m honest?
This recipe would be awesome with fresh blueberries. I wish for some blueberries in my CSA. I click my heels 3 times… I have tried growing blueberries before, with no luck. I don’t think I had my heart in it.
xoxo Nicole
I was in a REAL brick and mortar bookstore (read- Borders) just yesterday where I purchased your book on a whim. Or maybe it was more of an “Aha, I know I’ve heard that Shoestring name somewhere”. I’m loving it so far… although I am still in the reading phase and not yet in the baking phase. Patience, it’ll come. Our sweet town has this amazing little cafe/bakery that is 100% gluten free (IIIII knooooow, right?)… the other day I bought some pull-apart-rolls that were the best thing since gluten bread… now my mission is to bake them on my own because the concept of paying $4.00 for an 8 inch round of rolls is not something I relish on a regular basis. I’m just about convinced your Pate a Choux (now, that’s bossy… I’m just saying) might get me close.
On another note… my darling husband (of 7 months) and I had our first date at Borders… considering we were both Eng Lit majors and History minors, not surprising. A success story from eHarmony and Borders, where online meets reality. :)
Can’t wait to try out all your yummy recipes… my children will thank you!
Hi, PolkaDot,
Welcome to Gluten-Free on a Shoestring! I’m so happy that you bought the book at an actual honest-to-goodness bookstore. And even better that your first date was at a Border’s! I was an English major, too. We do tend to be rather attached to bookstores, don’t we? I love that eHarmony/Borders online/reality moment. Perfect!
Pate a Choux is, indeed, a little bossy-sounding. I can’t disagree. If you’re interested in pull-apart rolls, though, by the way, there is a recipe in the book for Dinner Rolls, which I make as pull-apart rolls, and there is also a recipe in the current issue of Living Without Magazine for gluten-free Honey Pull-Apart Rolls {I wrote the article – it has 5 GF breakfast recipes}. You can also see the article on LWO’s website here: http://www.livingwithout.com/issues/4_15/gluten_free_breakfast_breads-2555-1.html. The honey pull-apart rolls are the first recipe in the article.
Please stick around. I like your style!
xoxo Nicole
This looks delicious,can’t wait to try it! Clafoutis sounds kinda weird though. I don’t really like that word. I prefer to call it a cobbler-thing.
I love bookstores! But I don’t like Barnes and Noble or Books A Million. They don’t have places to sit (at least the ones around here don’t) I heard some terrible news this morning: All of the Border’s bookstores are closing. And that’s the only one we have with comfy chairs and good coffee that I love to spend hours in! :( It’s so sad!
Last night I attempted to make your pita recipe again, and they still didn’t puff up right. They were a little gooey in the middle too, but I was afraid to cook them any longer because they were getting a little too brown. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t use Better Batter, or if I’m just doing something wrong or I’m not a good knead-er… What do you think? I’ve been using Namaste brand flour blend, just because that was what we bought when I couldn’t eat potatoes. But I added back potatoes. And they don’t bother me a bit. The day I started eating potatoes again I went to McAllistar’s Deli and got one of those huge potatoes with cheese and sour cream. It was like a dream come true. a DELICIOUS, cheesy dream. So now I’ll have to buy Better Batter and try again. I wonder if they sell it at the grocery store here, or if I’ll need to order it from Amazon? I’ll have to check.
xx
Hi, Carrie!
Yeah. Clafoutis is weird.
I just took a quick look at the ingredients of Namaste GF flour, and it doesn’t really seem to have a ton of starch (tapioca appears to be the only one, since tapioca flour and tapioca starch are the same thing), which makes for baked goods that tend to be heavy. And I also see they only use brown rice flour, and no white rice flour. That is healthier, but doesn’t necessarily make for the best all purpose gluten free blend. So I’m going to guess that the reason they are gummy in the middle is your flour. But you also want to make sure that you’re shaping them thin enough. Could be a combination, but I’d blame most of it, without knowing more, on the flour. I have never used Namaste GF flour, though, so I can’t say for sure. Check Better Batter’s website for store locations. If there are none near you, order it directly from BB, rather than through Amazon, because I think her prices are better on her site.
Great news about potatoes! It does sound like a potatoey dream…
xoxo Nicole
Twelve tablespoons of butter?! Aiee. Okay, okay. I need to invite some guests over if I’m going to make this cherry sorta-cobbler. And I have to make it, because there are cherries in the fridge and they might go bad. Cherries gone bad are scary indeed.
Nicole, when you called me to go to the bookstore with you, I did not say I had to wash my hair. I said I had to *nosh* my *share*, that is, share of the yummy aebelskivers I had just made. If only you had been able to wait 30 minutes, I would have joined you, no problem. Just so you know, when I go into bookstores, I look for your cookbook. And it’s usually there! Seattle’s groovy that way.
I made beet dip the other day and thought of you. In my family, I’m the only one who sings, “We’ve got the Beet.”
Farida
Hi, Farida,
I know. 12 tablespoons of butter. But it makes either one 9×12-inch dish, or two half that size. It’s for sharing, for sure.
See that? That totally makes sense! Nosh your share! I have to turn up my hearing aid!
I love “We’ve got the beet.” I love puns. They may be the lowest form of humor, but I’m the lowest form of humorist.
xoxo Nicole
Speaking as someone who works at a Barnes & Noble, constantly recommends your book to anyone who buys a “GF for Dummies” or similar title (upselling, comarketing, what, you wrote a great book!), and mops spilt coffee out of the upholstered chairs in our store from the people who come and browse for hours, then don’t buy anything at all because “it’s cheaper online” (all after 20 minutes spent chasing all over the store to find books they didn’t bother to write down the names of before they came into the store and now can’t remember except that it’s blue and there’s a dog on the cover, etc.)– I’m still sorry that there wasn’t a place for you to sit at your particular store.
But … I will stick up for everyone who works at any brick and mortar, not just B & N, and say it’s hard to run store overhead on a shoestring when everyone buys everything online and uses the brick and mortar business as a browsing and gathering and list-compiling place, then goes home to shop. Coffee and one paperback/tchotcke per visit won’t pay an average starting rate of $8.00/hr (Fed. Min. Wage = $7.25) to staff and train personnel to turn on the lights, look things up in the computer, find people their books, man the registers, or make people their coffee. Much less maintain spot-free upholstered chairs. So corporate may cut comfy chair space to make room for more inexpensive take-away product people seem willing to buy, in the hopes struggling individual stores can stay open longer– alas, unlike Borders and their poor 10,700 remaining employees, whose executives didn’t leverage their declining customer (lack of) throughput in a fast enough manner, and now they’re ALL closed.
If the B & N’s you frequent seem a little more full/crowded and a little less thin with the help on the ground these days– well– yes. The answer isn’t that they don’t want your business– it’s that consumer business been going elsewhere (online) and now the stores have to adjust and while keeping the doors open. And as much as I, too, love indie bookstores– not everyone lives where indie bookstores are an option. Plus, people have to work somewhere. It’s just demographics.
(And don’t take the toddler seating personally. Kids’ books are bread and butter. Julia Child herself would have to sit on a kiddie seat were she to rise and offer to do an author signing in our store.)
Hi, She,
Thank you for upselling my book! I’m actually really honored. You work there, so you really know what else is out there.
I fear for the future of ALL brick & mortar bookstores, and I do my best to keep them in business! And people are always trying to encourage me to ‘buy online.’ But I have a Membership card at B&N! It cost me money! Bookstores make me feel human! Ew, gross, about the slovenly, ungracious people who drip, spill, make you run around, and then order online. Those people are the worst!
Poor Border’s. I can’t believe they’re entirely liquidating. Such a sad, sad state of affairs. They really were silly, though, in digging in so deep into CDs just as the digital revolution was gathering steam. They were doomed. Maybe that will mean that indie bookstores will find their place again? I have none in my town – and I do live 20 miles from midtown Manhattan, but it’s not practical to go in to the city just to go to a bookstore. Not that I haven’t considered it. :) Whenever I’m in town, though, I go right to The Strand.
Well, thank you for your perspective, and I will continue to try to support in-person stores, with their live people and spilled coffee!
xoxo Nicole
Have rhubarb in the freezer I’d like to make into strawberry/rhubarb muffins. This looks good too.
Nicole,
My daughter was just diagnosed with Celiac about two weeks ago and you’re right, it certainly is a change to make everything from scratch. People don’t seem to grasp the amount of effort (and love!) that goes into each and every bite she puts into her mouth. My husband and my other daughters are gearing up to make the switch to GF too, to make life easier on both me (in the kitchen) and our little GF girl. I’m so proud of my other girls for supporting their sister and sacrificing their brownies, etc for the sake of her sanity. She’s only 7 so jealousy issues are big right now. This wonderful clafoutis is currently steaming up my kitchen with its delectable scent. I’m so tempted to skip dinner and just let them all jump straight to dessert!
~Maggie
Hi, Maggie,
Welcome to Gluten-Free on a Shoestring! I’m so glad that you are planning to switch your house over to gluten-free for everyone. It is immensely easier for me to make one meal that everyone can eat and enjoy — as can my kids’ friends and our friends when they come over to visit. No one complains. There’s nothing to complain about! My 7 year old (the celiac in our family) is also 7 (he was diagnosed when he was a baby, though), so I know what you mean about jealousy’s looming large at that age. Seven is a tough age! I hope you and your family enjoy the clafoutis. I know mine did!
xoxo Nicole
Hi there,
Is all purpose flour the equivalent of a ‘plain flour’ or self raising flour blend?
Thanks, Lara
Lulz at Nicole’s ! “I don’t really like cooking with kids. I know, I’m horrible” remark. It’s worse when they’re lazy teenagers. I had to remind my son, as we were cooking together and he was mouthing off (I think that’s the only way teenage boys talk), which one of us was holding the knife. Admittedly, when he’s at his best he’s a joy to cook with.
I may be cooking this tomorrow. For today it was Dutch/German/Scandinavian/Norwegian pancakes.
Thanks,
Darlene
But your lazy teenager cracked the yeasted pita bread code for you! I’m honestly amazed that you can get him to cook with you. And you know you’ll spend the rest of his teenage days holding out for another moment where he’s a joy to cook with. *sigh*
I love that Dutchie pancake thing-o. A little powdered sugar, and I’m happy. Yum.
xoxo Nicole
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